Energy costs continue to escalate in a trend that has accelerated in recent years. Because of this, various industries have become increasingly sensitive to the impact of those rising costs. One area that has drawn increasing scrutiny is the IT infrastructure. Many companies are now looking at their IT systems' power usage to determine whether the energy costs can be reduced. For this reason, an industry focus on energy efficient networks has arisen to address the rising costs of IT equipment usage as a whole (e.g., PCs, displays, printers, servers, network components, etc.). Conventional approaches to measuring power usage use intrusive instrumentation to measure each component.
Modern networking components are increasingly implementing energy consumption and efficiency (ECE) control mechanisms. Some ECE control mechanisms allow physical layer components to enter and exit a low power state. An ECE control policy controls when and under what circumstances, ECE control enabled physical layer components enter and exit low power states. Device control policies play a key role in maximizing savings while minimizing performance impact on the network.
Even when networks are implemented using modern ECE mechanisms, there is no non-intrusive approach to measuring and controlling operational characteristics of various linked system devices.
The invention is described with reference to the accompanying drawings. The drawing in which an element first appears is typically indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.